What a mind-numbing, dispiriting process it is to see a great play laid low by a clunky, lacklustre and insensitive production.
And Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa is a truly great play. Its particular focus is a rural backwater in 1930s Donegal, and the drudging existence of five unmarried sisters cooped up under one impoverished roof. Youthful dreams are fading, they squabble and yet they squeeze moments of robust joy from the clench of drabness.
This mundane routine is, however, about to fracture for ever, and it’s the nature of hindsight – the elusive connections between past and present afforded by memories – that Friel explores with a decent lack of sentimentality, a vein of resilient humour and a tremendous understanding of the shifting dynamics within the group. He knows these women, knows how they embrace duty at the expense of happiness,
Programme notes suggest that the Original Theatre Company and the play’s director Alastair Whatley recognise the broad sweep and detailed humanity of Friel’s drama. You wouldn’t know it by what fetches up on-stage. Five sisters, all with different attempts at an Irish accent, munching their way through the dialogue with no character beyond a raised voice, a giggle or a rush of words. Whatley himself is the narrator, the now-grown child revisiting that 1936 summer of change. His pedestrian plod through the final speech sums up the sheer gracelessness of a production that reduces dancing to a series of movements – you get the mechanics, but no heartbeat, no poetry, no Friel.
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